A Hidden Origin Story of the CBD Craze
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Flower is typically tested for compliance against the psychoactive delta9-THC in most states (not in all states though), which ignores the THCA content. But THCA is converted to delta9-THC when heated/"decarboxylated", which is a pretty big loophole.
These communities [1][2] are buying ounces of weed through the mail.
A better example is probably this 17 gram edible [3]. At 0.3% d9-THC, that's a ~5mg dose of psychoactive THC per package. You can buy these all over the US in states like Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky... Places not exactly known to be "weed friendly". See this map [4].
Pot has basically been legalized everywhere and people just don't know about it yet.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/hempflowers/
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/CBDhempBuds/
[3]: https://lunchboxalchemycbd.com/products/full-spectrum-hemp-s...
You can order CBD off the internet.
The same is not true for hemp.
[1]: https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/delta8-THC
[2]: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=patentimages.storage.goog...
Reminds of how there’s always that one person in any group who says something like:
“You reckon that’s good? You should try my cousins shit”, or some variant.
Or how every 25 / 30 / 35 / 40 45 / 50 / 55 / 60 year old / dead drug users will say “it’s not like it was back in my day”.
Even in just the last 20 years(when we have much better data) there has been a large increase in potency.
Brick weed tests closer to 4-7% THC.
Many retailers I sell to won’t accept any indoor under 20% and the flower testing >26% sells out fast. We are currently working to retire any sub-25% strain because today’s consumer buys on potency. Most recently I sold out of a 31% THC potency GG4.
Phinest Cannabis is releasing a strain called ‘Fatso’ that they’ve had test at 39% total THC. I don’t think we’re at the end of the line yet.
Why is that? Is it cheaper? Would you be able to supply less potent product cheaper (maybe shorter growing times or less work or other reason)?
I know nothing about this field but I find some of the comments here fascinating.
With a more potent product, I can use the first cover and get the same effect with much less vegetable material.
1. Any correlation between price and potency is very weak; any price point will have a wide range of potency within it.
2. Products rotate constantly, so consumers are facing a new set of choices with every purchase.
3. Modern packaging removes the tactile element from selecting your flowers. some places still keep sample cups so you can smell the strain, but most people are evaluating based on the information on the label now. If you don't have a deep knowledge of weed strains, the potency is the easiest thing to compare.
Knowing the difference between two weed varieties is more like being able to tell the difference between two Assam's, except you have to evaluate that difference while stoned.
Or at least that’s what those going to dispensaries think.
You see a strain with 30% THC and you’re like holy shit, so then the 17% THC strain next to it looks like trash. And people figure it’s more bang for you buck cause you’ll have to use less.
Though, from what I’ve seen, this isn’t the way to buy. I think it was judges for the Cannabis Cup or some other major marijuana cup judges that said that pretty much all their favorites are below 20%, one said their favorite of the year was like 15%. This is because the growers and breeders didn’t just focus on pumping out THC, but focused on all aspects of the plant, such as terpenes which help influence the type of high you feel. Their primary suggestion was to let your nose lead you, as the smellier the weed, the more terpenes.
Personally I'd rather just use extracts.
I have bought lower potency flowers when they were on sale at a good price, but I prefer the stronger stuff since I can use that much less of it.
BTW, isn't it interesting that we can talk about this in public now? It sure is different from decades in the past where we had to use code words on phone calls.
The code word in my circles was "programmer's fuel"!
"Do you have time?"
--"Not now, but I'll have time later."
Not that I’m currently in a legal state anyway but...
And despite a decades-long love affair with strong IPAs, most craft beer areas have been big into low alcohol kettle sours, etc for the last 5 years or so. IPAs haven't gone away, just moved to the sidelines
Maybe more kettle sours are being brewed, but sold?
Close relative to Marijuana as I understand.
That reminds me, I really need to send some email to Untitled Art begging them to please do another run of the fabulous “rainbow sherbet” beer I only got ever one can of...
Now there is plenty of low THC weed out there. The dispensaries just don't offer it for some reason. You can find it in head shops and online. These are very good strains, mind you, bred with intention by skilled growers.
If cannabis was legal on a federal level, we'd likely see more low-mid THC strains emerge in markets. Right now there's a weird legal gap between what headshops can sell and what dispensaries are interested in selling, so the ~1-5% THC weed is pretty niche.
There's quite a lot of energy going into that those alternative strains right now. People are cultivating lots of other cannabinoids, CBG, CBN, CBT, CBC... and many more. They're making some good ones too!
It’s just not possible at these THC levels I see when I visit retail in legal places. I can smoke a gram or two in a evening if I’m really trying.
FWIW I never smoked cigarettes for similar reason, taste like crap and stinks too IMO. Even when I smoke cigars I regret it for 24-48 hours cause of smell and taste left in my mouth/tongue feel. MJ doesn’t do that per se, but I do have to change clothes and basically take a shower before sleeping. I really don’t like smell of smoke. It’s a weird thing I know.
Tobacco is a dangerous addictive drug that ruins your health and shortens your life.
It's a social act, one has to roll it, pass it, i've even met people who had some superstitions and strong beliefs about the correct way of consuming a joint (weed in general) :P
Too much THC relative to other compounds ruins the experience for me.
When I feel the urge to reach that far, I'd rather use LSD or Shrooms.
Think about the "megapixel craze" of the mid-2000's digital camera market.
It was clear to any well-informed enthusiast that megapixels are not even in the top 5 most important aspects of a good camera.
I had a neighbour who was a pro photographer shooting on an 8-megapixel Nikon professional-grade DSLR--which still had far, far better quality than any consumer-level 20-megapixel shooter.
I guess my point is, if the industry is only focused on this one number, perhaps it's ignoring the possibility that a strain with "only" 15% THC, if the chemistry is balanced in a certain way, will ultimately be more effective than some 31% monster-bud?
It's not fair to lay the blame on the potency wars. The flower you smoked in the 00s was selected based on its yield per acre, its strength against the elements, and whether the strain would finish growing before the rain comes.
If you want to enjoy the flavor your best bet is using concentrates. Tthe concentrate guys are purely focused on flavor. They cultivate strains specifically for their terpene profile and are focused on maintaining that profile for the consumer.
Make you go crazy? I've had friends who were all-day stoners for 20+ years. I've never seen anyone "go crazy". Become lazy yes, get couch-locked yes, get really creative yes, have short attention spans yes; crazy, no. Worst I've seen is someone who's never smoked do a dab (inhale highly concentrated THC as a vapor) and have a paranoid panic attack, after which I learned that they were prone to panic attacks. I do agree, however, that the genetically engineered marijuana of today is at least 5% more potent than the stuffs of the 60s-70s.
I don't think it caused those diseases in those people, but I think if you have schizophrenia or bipolar I, or critically if you might have it but are not yet diagnosed, it can mix poorly and you could be in for a bad time with long term consequences, so be careful.
I am in favor of legalization, but people need to get less defensive about this. It's harmless for most people and shouldn't be a crime for law abiding adults. But there's real risks for that small subset of people.
Also anecdotal: There were a few times where I saw mental health professionals ask in my town "how often do you use cannabis?" as one of the first screening questions, one of them said offhand that they see it a lot in their line of work.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2801827/
I've seen two peoples' [predisposition to?] schizophrenia catch up with them during times when they were smoking a lot of weed. I've also personally experienced high THC weed exacerbate my own mental health.
And I'd actually blame prohibition for producing all this high potency space weed coupled with an foolish assumption that "high potency is better because it's more bang for your buck." (If you can handle your space weed I'm not mad at you!) I'm extremely grateful to the people who worked so hard to make cannabis legal, because now we have people growing a variety of strains that work for everyone.
Is there any good data about what percent THC was common back then? I fond a few articles giving numbers between 1 and 4% without citations, and one Atlantic piece [0] calling it a myth. In any case it seems like it must have been higher than 0.3%, unless people really smoked ~40 times more in one sitting.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/03/was-m...
What I am saying is that due to bureaucracy and loopholes, there is a lot of hemp being sold in the US right now that's high in THCA (1%-4% is a reasonable range, maybe even higher) but is technically underneath the 0.3% d9-THC threshold that the labs are testing for.
This must surely have been instituted by growers to fool lawmakers into thinking they could self regulate or something?
But even the scientific studies sometimes don't use the recommended dose because 600mg CBD costs too much for 2 times daily for a month.
CBD is not active at the CB1 or CB2 receptors. It has very low affinity for them. It has moderate affinity for the serotonin-1a autoreceptor (that the anti-anxiety medication buspirone also targets). But only at very high dosages (ie, 300mg+).
I just bought 1650mg of low THC CBD to see if it would do anything for mild arthritis, $40.
Via a friend of a friend, I was able to get a bottle of "Jayden's Juice", a brand from California which is 20:1 CBD:THC or something like that. My daily dose of THC was 1mg or 1.5mg, and even for a THC virgin like me, it had no mental or sensory effect, but sure enough, my stiffness was reduced and the flare ups were less intense. It wasn't dramatic, it took two or three days to notice the effect, but it seemed to be real. I stopped for a few weeks just to test if the correlation held up, then started again. The stiffness/pain tracked. This is a data point of one, and non-blinded study at that, so it is easy to dismiss this as placebo effect. On the other hand, the CBD-only oils didn't help even though many people say it helps them and I went in hoping I would get the same benefit.
Unfortunately, I'm in Texas and driving round trip to a THC legal state is at least 25 hours, so instead I have continued to sample Texas-legal CBD tinctures, hoping one helps in the same way.
I happen to be friends with the Jayden's Juice guys. I do a lot of processing through their facility. It's great to hear your story. I actually had a conversation with them last month about releasing a CBD-only version of Jayden's Juice for the mass market but they steadfastly refused on principle. I am glad you were able to find relief. If you'd like, drop me your email and I'd be glad to send you a care package.
What is this supposed to mean?
Is high potency marijuana making people go / act crazy?
If so, I wasn’t aware of that and would like to know more.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4604190/ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092099641...
The balance is really important and there are a lot of individual factors.
It gets more complicated than you describe. Good and bad actors exist. The subreddits you pointed to mostly contain people looking for an alternative to smoking weed for a variety of reasons. Most of them center on CBD effects on the body without the mental high associated with THC. Most of the legal hemp flower strains are 30 CBD : 1 THC. CBD also acts as an antagonist for THC and can bring you down from a high very quickly.
Plenty of bad actors also exist. There are now also labs that are exploring rare cannabinoids like THCv and THC-delta-8. These cannabinoids have similar effects to THC but are technically hemp.
The laws are extremely broken and I think eventually there will be a reckoning for people trying to get others high through loopholes. Hopefully, companies trying to make non-psychoactive products like CBD, CBG, and CBN won't get caught in the cross-fire.
This is not exactly true. It is federally legal, but states can still ban it. Idaho and North Dakota both have, and North Carolina passed a law which will do so.
I run a CBD hemp flower company and we have to keep up with the shifting state laws.
(I mean, I'm going to do my research first to check state and federal laws, but I didn't know something had changed federally.)
ETA: Sounds like it's legal federally, but it's less clear what the deal is in my state, where I can only find commercial guidance: https://www.mass.gov/guides/hemp-in-massachusetts-faqs
“That raised a lot of eyebrows, including in McConnell’s office,” Eric Steenstra, a hemp lobbyist, told me. “They saw the winds were shifting.”
Along with Representative Jared Polis, now the governor of Colorado, Mr. McConnell included a hemp pilot program in the 2014 farm bill — for “research.” In the legislation, hemp was defined as cannabis containing less than 0.3 percent THC — an arbitrary threshold, not a scientific distinction: Nothing in the Farm Bill, in case law, or in the Controlled Substances Act seemed to say anything about CBD. So entrepreneurs interpreted this research-oriented pilot program as the de facto legalization of cannabidiol.
The Drug Enforcement Administration disagreed, but couldn’t stop the tidal wave of CBD production. In 2018, over 60 percent of the hemp crop in Kentucky was grown for CBD. Then, long after the country was already flooded with CBD products both dubious and legitimate, Mr. McConnell inserted language into the 2018 Farm Bill explicitly making hemp federally legal.«
Then this farm bill passes, without a lot of fanfare (about cannabis) and poof, it's legal across all 50 states (as long as it's less than 0.3% THC).
What's interesting to me is how the DEA is losing influence. They not only tried to stop this legislation, but also kratom (they were making it schedule 1 as well). Due to public outcry, the DEA backed down and we're in this weird limbo where kratom remains legal federally, even though the DEA doesn't want it to be.
I'm guessing over the next 20-30 years, we'll see a lot of changes with regards to the war on drugs. It started with marijuana, but it won't stop there.
Lawrence Ringo introduced me to a lot of my supply chain before his passing. The network of farmers he worked with were largely not able to make the transition to the recreational cannabis industry.
Mel Frank cultivated cannabis in the next room over from my first manufacturing lab. Super nice guy with a real love of the plant.
Reading articles like this make me miss the old days of cannabis when there was more passion for the plant.
Yes, the industry has been taken over by people who don't actually use the stuff. That says something.
The 2018 Farm bill legalized < 0.3% delta-9 THC which basically legalized all hemp flower strains that are currently popular to grow.
However, 2020 USDA regulations and various state regulations are changing that to TOTAL THC which includes THCA, which is typically at 0.4-0.6% for all popular strains.
The market is about to get seriously hurt for 2020 if this comes to fully pass and a lot of farmers are confused about the new regulations.
They opted for naturopathic treatment instead, relying on CBD oil, amongst other things.
I’m sure, like all medicines, CBD oil is highly effective, when used for the right ailment. In this case it might even have prolonged a life, and might have been an amazing co-medicine alongside more brutal modern treatments like chemo. But it definitely did not cure or even stop the progress of the cancer.